Ringwood Manor, a two-century-old estate whose ironworks and owners played key roles in America's growth from the Revolutionary War through the Gilded Age, will reopen to the public today after a two-year restoration.

The $1.6 million restoration of many of the manor's 51 rooms, as well as an eclectic collection of more than 8,000 artifacts that date from the 1490s to the 1920s, occurred after the home's furnace malfunctioned in January of 2012, spewing a fine mist of oily soot on nearly every surface. The soot coated paintings, historic mantelpieces and Civil War artifacts.

Sue Shulte, Ringwood Manor's historic interpretive specialist, discovered the disaster when she arrived for work one morning.

"I was opening up, touching door knobs and things and noticed that my hand had turned black," said Shulte. "I saw that the soot was on the mantelpieces, the furnishings — it was everywhere.

"My heart went into my throat and I had this moment of terror, but then your instincts and training kick in," she said.

She contacted the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, which sent an emergency response team to assess the damage and provide a restoration blueprint. The state, which has owned the manor for 75 years, hired a number of contractors to clean the artifacts, restore the wallpaper and plaster, and repaint the manor's interior.

The state will hold an open house today for the public to view the restored manor and the artifacts. The day's events will include Victorian reenactors and a Victorian-era baseball game.

Guided tours will resume next Wednesday.

The restoration provided innumerable challenges to the contractors.

"Some of the most difficult objects to clean were the inlaid furniture, because the glues holding pieces together had begun to fail," said Brian Howard of B.R. Howard and Associates, the principal restoration contractor.

Workers had to clean brittle hand-painted wallpaper that had started to pull from the plaster walls. They cleaned sculptures, the extensive wainscoting through the rooms, and even a buffalo head that had been a gift to the manor's owners from Buffalo Bill Cody.

Some of the rooms ended up looking better than they had before the furnace incident, since decades of grime from coal-powered heating was removed from the old wallpaper, exposing the original vibrant colors.

The restoration also uncovered some new historic details about the manor, Shulte said. One painting had been encased in a mantelpiece, and when it was removed for cleaning, restorers found on the back a letter dated from 1780 and written in French by the artist — Jacques Henri Sablet. The painting's creator had not been known until then.

Ringwood Manor is the centerpiece of Ringwood State Park in Bergen and Passaic counties. The state paid for the restoration using insurance payouts and corporation business tax revenue, said Bob Martin, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the state park system.

The damage came less than a year after someone disabled the Manor's alarm system and stole two paintings by Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey, each worth at least $150,000, along with antique guns, bayonets, dolls, vases and silverware. Those items have not been recovered.

The property occupied by Ringwood Manor was originally the site of the American Iron Company, run by Robert Erskine, who emigrated from Scotland in 1771 to oversee the company.

The ironworks provided material for weapons used by American rebel forces during the Revolutionary War, including components of the famous chain stretched across the Hudson River at West Point to prevent the British from controlling the river and dividing the rebelling colonies.

Erskine was also a mapmaker for George Washington, producing more than 200 detailed topographic maps of the region, which helped Washington outmaneuver the British. Erskine died in 1780, and by 1810 his home at Ringwood had been either burned down or demolished by Martin Ryerson, who purchased the site in 1807. Ryerson built the first portion of the current Ringwood Manor.

Ryerson's ironworks furnaces manufactured shot for the War of 1812. When he died in 1839, the iron business foundered. In 1853, the Ringwood property was purchased by industrialist Peter Cooper, who was expanding his Trenton Ironworks. Cooper, an inventor who built the first commercially used American steam locomotive and came up with the widely used package gelatin known today as Jell-O, accumulated wealth as his ironworks produced rails for the growing railroad industry. Cooper was involved in laying the first cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean to transmit telegraph messages between North America and Britain. He also founded Cooper Union, a college in Manhattan focused on art, architecture and engineering.

Cooper's son, Edward, along with Abram Hewitt, ran the ironworks business. Hewitt married Edward's sister, Sarah. Hewitt served a term as mayor of New York and several terms as a congressman. Sarah Cooper Hewitt expanded Ringwood Manor and landscaped the grounds. She and her sister, Eleanor, also opened a gallery in New York that became the Cooper-Hewitt, a museum focused on design that is part of the Smithsonian.